Slashdot Mirror

Please let us all keep in mind that only three years ago Parrot was merely an April Fool's joke (and quite brilliant at that). See the original Perl and Python Announce Joint Development press release on use Perl, the interview with Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum on Perl.com and the O'Reilly book announcement: Programming Parrot in a Nutshell by Guido van Rossum and Larry Wall. Does anyone remember the Perl + Python = Parrot Slashdot story? I am sure that back then absolutely no one was expecting that it might all come true some day. That's amazing how much has happened during those last few years.

Aha! So even Larry Wall admits Perl is all "gobbledygook"! This does not bode well for Perl 6.

As a matter of fact, it does bode well for Perl 6. Even very well, I might add. As Larry Wall has said in his famous State of the Onion speech on TPC4: "Perl 5 was my rewrite of Perl. I want Perl 6 to be the community's rewrite of Perl and of the community." Also, please let me quote the first Apocalypse: "What I will be revealing in these columns will be the design of Perl 6. Or more accurately, the beginnings of that design, since the design process will certainly continue after I've had my initial say in the matter. I'm not omniscient, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding. This job of playing God is a little too big for me. Nevertheless, someone has to do it, so I'll try my best to fake it. And I'll expect all of you to help me out with the process of creating history. We all have to do our bit with free will." Now, I can assure you that those four years were not wasted as you seem to imply. I think Larry Wall has used the right words on OSCON 2003:

• We the unwilling,
• led by the unknowing,
• are doing the impossible
• for the ungrateful.
• We have done so much for so long with so little
• We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

How true...

ruby? Python? Kid's toys.

Common Lisp. Enough Said. Okay maybe Scheme, if you're a bit of a masochist...

Everyone is right here. There is no one language which is best for everyone. Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Python, Lisp, Scheme... They are all going to target Parrot so we will be able to choose our favourite language and still work together instantiating our objects and even inheriting from each other's classes crossing the cross-language boundaries. A very impressive work has already been done in the 0.1.0 "Leaping Kakapo" version of Parrot. See: Parrot FAQ and the languages directory in the CVS.

ruby? Python? Kid's toys.

Common Lisp. Enough Said. Okay maybe Scheme, if you're a bit of a masochist...

Everyone is right here. There is no one language which is best for everyone. Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Python, Lisp, Scheme... They are all going to target Parrot so we will be able to choose our favourite language and still work together instantiating our objects and even inheriting from each other's classes crossing the cross-language boundaries. A very impressive work has already been done in the 0.1.0 "Leaping Kakapo" version of Parrot. See: Parrot FAQ and the languages directory in the CVS.

In the name of the entire Slashdot community, I would like to thank Larry Wall for the absolutely amazing work he is doing. Thanks Larry! There are many people working very hard to make our dream come true and give us the most innovative and cutting-edge programming language in existance, which Perl 6 is soon going to be. It would not be possible without all of the Perl 6 and Parrot contributors. Please let us also not forget about brave people who still actively maintain Perl 5 and will keep doing it even after Perl 6 is ready. The Ponie project shows us that Perl 5 is not going away. The work of all of those people is invaluable. And this is all to give us free software development platform of the 21st century, while uniting Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Scheme, Ook, Forth, Befunge, BASIC and many other languages thanks to Parrot, finally allowing them all to seamlessly work together and ending the flame wars between them. Thank you!

In the name of the entire Slashdot community, I would like to thank Larry Wall for the absolutely amazing work he is doing. Thanks Larry! There are many people working very hard to make our dream come true and give us the most innovative and cutting-edge programming language in existance, which Perl 6 is soon going to be. It would not be possible without all of the Perl 6 and Parrot contributors. Please let us also not forget about brave people who still actively maintain Perl 5 and will keep doing it even after Perl 6 is ready. The Ponie project shows us that Perl 5 is not going away. The work of all of those people is invaluable. And this is all to give us free software development platform of the 21st century, while uniting Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Scheme, Ook, Forth, Befunge, BASIC and many other languages thanks to Parrot, finally allowing them all to seamlessly work together and ending the flame wars between them. Thank you!

I have submitted a story but it was rejected, so please let me resubmit it as a first post instead.

The long awaited Apocalypse 12 by Larry Wall has been just announced by chromatic on perl6-language mailing list. It is one of the most important documents explaining the Perl 6 language design. (All of the previous design decisions are available as Apocalypses by Larry Wall, Exegeses by Damian Conway and Synopses by Luke Palmer, Damian Conway and Allison Randal.) Apocalypse 12 talks about Object Oriented aspects of Perl 6, i.e. about Objects, Classes, Roles (also known as Traits), Multiple Dispatch and also covers some non-OO decisions:

"The official, unofficial slogan of Perl 6 is "Second System Syndrome Done Right!". After you read this Apocalypse you will at least be certain that we got the "Second System" part down pat. But we've also put in a little bit of work on the "Done Right" part, which we hope you'll recognize. The management of complexity is complex, but only if you think about it. The goal of Perl 6 is to discourage you from thinking about it unnecessarily." --- Larry Wall.

(Lameness filter didn't allow me to post the table of contents. Reason: Please use less whitespace.)

You can access the entire document as a print friendly version. The standard version of Apocalypse 12 is divided into 20 parts. Enjoy.

If you are new to Perl 6 and Parrot, then Perl 6 Essentials by Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski and Leopold Tötsch might be a great introduction. The second edition should be published soon.

I have submitted a story but it was rejected, so please let me resubmit it as a first post instead.

The long awaited Apocalypse 12 by Larry Wall has been just announced by chromatic on perl6-language mailing list. It is one of the most important documents explaining the Perl 6 language design. (All of the previous design decisions are available as Apocalypses by Larry Wall, Exegeses by Damian Conway and Synopses by Luke Palmer, Damian Conway and Allison Randal.) Apocalypse 12 talks about Object Oriented aspects of Perl 6, i.e. about Objects, Classes, Roles (also known as Traits), Multiple Dispatch and also covers some non-OO decisions:

"The official, unofficial slogan of Perl 6 is "Second System Syndrome Done Right!". After you read this Apocalypse you will at least be certain that we got the "Second System" part down pat. But we've also put in a little bit of work on the "Done Right" part, which we hope you'll recognize. The management of complexity is complex, but only if you think about it. The goal of Perl 6 is to discourage you from thinking about it unnecessarily." --- Larry Wall.

(Lameness filter didn't allow me to post the table of contents. Reason: Please use less whitespace.)

You can access the entire document as a print friendly version. The standard version of Apocalypse 12 is divided into 20 parts. Enjoy.

If you are new to Perl 6 and Parrot, then Perl 6 Essentials by Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski and Leopold Tötsch might be a great introduction. The second edition should be published soon.

I have submitted a story but it was rejected, so please let me resubmit it as a first post instead.

The long awaited Apocalypse 12 by Larry Wall has been just announced by chromatic on perl6-language mailing list. It is one of the most important documents explaining the Perl 6 language design. (All of the previous design decisions are available as Apocalypses by Larry Wall, Exegeses by Damian Conway and Synopses by Luke Palmer, Damian Conway and Allison Randal.) Apocalypse 12 talks about Object Oriented aspects of Perl 6, i.e. about Objects, Classes, Roles (also known as Traits), Multiple Dispatch and also covers some non-OO decisions:

"The official, unofficial slogan of Perl 6 is "Second System Syndrome Done Right!". After you read this Apocalypse you will at least be certain that we got the "Second System" part down pat. But we've also put in a little bit of work on the "Done Right" part, which we hope you'll recognize. The management of complexity is complex, but only if you think about it. The goal of Perl 6 is to discourage you from thinking about it unnecessarily." --- Larry Wall.

(Lameness filter didn't allow me to post the table of contents. Reason: Please use less whitespace.)

You can access the entire document as a print friendly version. The standard version of Apocalypse 12 is divided into 20 parts. Enjoy.

If you are new to Perl 6 and Parrot, then Perl 6 Essentials by Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski and Leopold Tötsch might be a great introduction. The second edition should be published soon.

I have submitted a story but it was rejected, so please let me resubmit it as a first post instead.

The long awaited Apocalypse 12 by Larry Wall has been just announced by chromatic on perl6-language mailing list. It is one of the most important documents explaining the Perl 6 language design. (All of the previous design decisions are available as Apocalypses by Larry Wall, Exegeses by Damian Conway and Synopses by Luke Palmer, Damian Conway and Allison Randal.) Apocalypse 12 talks about Object Oriented aspects of Perl 6, i.e. about Objects, Classes, Roles (also known as Traits), Multiple Dispatch and also covers some non-OO decisions:

"The official, unofficial slogan of Perl 6 is "Second System Syndrome Done Right!". After you read this Apocalypse you will at least be certain that we got the "Second System" part down pat. But we've also put in a little bit of work on the "Done Right" part, which we hope you'll recognize. The management of complexity is complex, but only if you think about it. The goal of Perl 6 is to discourage you from thinking about it unnecessarily." --- Larry Wall.

(Lameness filter didn't allow me to post the table of contents. Reason: Please use less whitespace.)

You can access the entire document as a print friendly version. The standard version of Apocalypse 12 is divided into 20 parts. Enjoy.

If you are new to Perl 6 and Parrot, then Perl 6 Essentials by Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski and Leopold Tötsch might be a great introduction. The second edition should be published soon.

I have submitted a story but it was rejected, so please let me resubmit it as a first post instead.

The long awaited Apocalypse 12 by Larry Wall has been just announced by chromatic on perl6-language mailing list. It is one of the most important documents explaining the Perl 6 language design. (All of the previous design decisions are available as Apocalypses by Larry Wall, Exegeses by Damian Conway and Synopses by Luke Palmer, Damian Conway and Allison Randal.) Apocalypse 12 talks about Object Oriented aspects of Perl 6, i.e. about Objects, Classes, Roles (also known as Traits), Multiple Dispatch and also covers some non-OO decisions:

"The official, unofficial slogan of Perl 6 is "Second System Syndrome Done Right!". After you read this Apocalypse you will at least be certain that we got the "Second System" part down pat. But we've also put in a little bit of work on the "Done Right" part, which we hope you'll recognize. The management of complexity is complex, but only if you think about it. The goal of Perl 6 is to discourage you from thinking about it unnecessarily." --- Larry Wall.

(Lameness filter didn't allow me to post the table of contents. Reason: Please use less whitespace.)

You can access the entire document as a print friendly version. The standard version of Apocalypse 12 is divided into 20 parts. Enjoy.

If you are new to Perl 6 and Parrot, then Perl 6 Essentials by Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski and Leopold Tötsch might be a great introduction. The second edition should be published soon.

I have submitted a story but it was rejected, so please let me resubmit it as a first post instead.

The long awaited Apocalypse 12 by Larry Wall has been just announced by chromatic on perl6-language mailing list. It is one of the most important documents explaining the Perl 6 language design. (All of the previous design decisions are available as Apocalypses by Larry Wall, Exegeses by Damian Conway and Synopses by Luke Palmer, Damian Conway and Allison Randal.) Apocalypse 12 talks about Object Oriented aspects of Perl 6, i.e. about Objects, Classes, Roles (also known as Traits), Multiple Dispatch and also covers some non-OO decisions:

"The official, unofficial slogan of Perl 6 is "Second System Syndrome Done Right!". After you read this Apocalypse you will at least be certain that we got the "Second System" part down pat. But we've also put in a little bit of work on the "Done Right" part, which we hope you'll recognize. The management of complexity is complex, but only if you think about it. The goal of Perl 6 is to discourage you from thinking about it unnecessarily." --- Larry Wall.

(Lameness filter didn't allow me to post the table of contents. Reason: Please use less whitespace.)

You can access the entire document as a print friendly version. The standard version of Apocalypse 12 is divided into 20 parts. Enjoy.

If you are new to Perl 6 and Parrot, then Perl 6 Essentials by Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski and Leopold Tötsch might be a great introduction. The second edition should be published soon.

Differences between the two lists and more topics about our project are described on the SURBL site. If anyone has a question or comment about SURBL you can write to me directly at jeffc at surbl dot org, or much better ask the growing SURBL community on our discussion list. The separate announcement list is a good way to keep up with news about the project. Archives of the lists are available on the list site.

Folks who have tried SURBL have generally been pleased with the results, and we expect to improve the ~60% spam detection rate and lower the already low (<0.1%) false positive rate further in the next version of the data engine behind sc.surbl.org. As has been previously mentioned, Devin Carraway has written an MTA use of SURBL domain data to check message body URIs in his qpsmtpd plugin called uribl. This is the first MTA use for SURBL that I've heard of, though I don't necessarily claim to have heard of all uses of SURBL so far. Some other folks are thinking about implementing a sendmail milter for which will probably use sc.surbl.org since they are also a major ISP source of SpamCop's data.

Since I probably won't be posting here too often, I'd like to thank some of the people who have been quietly very supportive and responsible for the success of this effort so far including Eric Kolve, Justin Mason, Daniel Quinlan, Raymond Dijkxhoorn, Julian Haight, Kelsey Cummings and others who already know how greatly they have helped to make SURBL possible.

One thing we could use some help with now are more BIND-compatible secondary DNS servers and rsynced rbldnsd servers. Please see the SURBL site for details, and lend a hand if you can. DNS traffic may get kind of heavy when SA 3.0 comes out since it has SURBL support in URIDNSBL (URIBL), so we definitely need some help with name service.

Despite all of Guido Van Sustren's claims to the contrary, Python's garbage collector just doesn't work correctly, allowing the programmer to create a circular reference which never gets resolved. This is a critical impediment to writing mission critical applications in Python, as they will eventually run out of memory and fail.

Python is an excellent beginner's language, well-suited to replace Visual Basic or possibly even Perl for many tasks. But testing about unit testing before we address a fundamental design flaw such as memory leakage is tantamount to putting the cart before the horse. Python's memory issues need to be fixed before the language can break out of its niche.

Is there anything Perl CAN'T do? I don't think so.

It is suboptimal with defining grammars and writing lexers, parsers and compilers. At least it is not as good as Lex and Yacc or Bison. Fortunately, it will change.

Is there anything Perl CAN'T do? I don't think so.

It is suboptimal with defining grammars and writing lexers, parsers and compilers. At least it is not as good as Lex and Yacc or Bison. Fortunately, it will change.

Is there anything Perl CAN'T do? I don't think so.

It is suboptimal with defining grammars and writing lexers, parsers and compilers. At least it is not as good as Lex and Yacc or Bison. Fortunately, it will change.

Well, I know of at least one Arizona tech company that's doing well and looking for new employees. Any quality mod_perl/HTML::Mason people out there looking for work in Sunny Tucson?

First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, as I enjoy most of your posts. For what it's worth, I think you are an excellent writer and thinker.

Thank you very much. I think you are too kind. I will quote you, though, if you don't mind.

While I don't have time to respond to your entire post, I did want to highlight one point where I disagreed with you.

I have never seen anyone saying that all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists. Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying that anywhere.

I have often experienced the sentiment that if you beleive in God you are not smart/logical/rational. I've heard it from strangers and close friends. There are even examples in the discussion you linked to in your last post. On Slashdot, I have been called weak-minded for beleiving in God.

That is very strange, almost unbelievable. Next time you might point such an ignorant person to Perl 6 website, and ask her to read Apocalypses by Larry Wall, especially Apocalypse 4 talking about the syntax per se, Apocalypse 3 explaining the operators in details, Apocalypse 5 about regular expressions, grammar rules and pattern matching in general, Apocalypse 6 on subroutines, closures, methods, submethods, multimethods, rules and macros, and the soon-to-be-published Apocalypse 12 about objects, classes, traits and roles (and I mean really read them, not merely skim or take a look at, it is actually quite an entertaining read anyway), which together form the most smart/logical/rational fundamentals of programming language design I have seen to date, and then ask her if she still thinks that when one believes in God one is not smart/logical/rational any more.

Indeed, Larry Wall being a hacker god (pun not intended this time) and also being alive at the same time, might actually be a better candidate for your Slashdot signature than Albert Einstein himself. Besides, Einstein never wanted to be a missionary, if I recall correctly, and thus his faith might be questioned.

Speaking about faith and reason, it seems rather strange that people consider them mutually exclusive. I myself always considered faith to be completely orthogonal to reason. Furthermore, I also fail to understand any desire to prove the existance of any object of faith (be it some deity or otherwise) because as soon as it is proved (assuming that it can be proved) it is not a faith (defined as a belief beyond evidence or logical arguments) any more and becomes merely a knowledge of a simple fact. Let me quote Gary Curtis. "To believe a dogma without evidence, or even despite counter-evidence, is sometimes regarded as more admirable than to believe on good evidence."

Therefore, if any religion was provable (and subsequently proved), there would be no need for faith any more. Even more importantly, proving the validity of any particular religion or faith system, would have to inevitably disprove most of other religions as a side effect, for most of them being mutually contradictory cannot be valid simultaneously.

Now, if we assume faith and reason to be orthogonal (which I believe is the only reasonable way to consider them) then using reason to analyze faith (which by definition would be inherently unanalyzable) might lead to committing subtle fallacies, like e.g. this quite popular one:

Every event must have a cause. Therefore, there must be a cause of every event, that is, a first cau

First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, as I enjoy most of your posts. For what it's worth, I think you are an excellent writer and thinker.

Thank you very much. I think you are too kind. I will quote you, though, if you don't mind.

While I don't have time to respond to your entire post, I did want to highlight one point where I disagreed with you.

I have never seen anyone saying that all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists. Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying that anywhere.

I have often experienced the sentiment that if you beleive in God you are not smart/logical/rational. I've heard it from strangers and close friends. There are even examples in the discussion you linked to in your last post. On Slashdot, I have been called weak-minded for beleiving in God.

That is very strange, almost unbelievable. Next time you might point such an ignorant person to Perl 6 website, and ask her to read Apocalypses by Larry Wall, especially Apocalypse 4 talking about the syntax per se, Apocalypse 3 explaining the operators in details, Apocalypse 5 about regular expressions, grammar rules and pattern matching in general, Apocalypse 6 on subroutines, closures, methods, submethods, multimethods, rules and macros, and the soon-to-be-published Apocalypse 12 about objects, classes, traits and roles (and I mean really read them, not merely skim or take a look at, it is actually quite an entertaining read anyway), which together form the most smart/logical/rational fundamentals of programming language design I have seen to date, and then ask her if she still thinks that when one believes in God one is not smart/logical/rational any more.

Indeed, Larry Wall being a hacker god (pun not intended this time) and also being alive at the same time, might actually be a better candidate for your Slashdot signature than Albert Einstein himself. Besides, Einstein never wanted to be a missionary, if I recall correctly, and thus his faith might be questioned.

Speaking about faith and reason, it seems rather strange that people consider them mutually exclusive. I myself always considered faith to be completely orthogonal to reason. Furthermore, I also fail to understand any desire to prove the existance of any object of faith (be it some deity or otherwise) because as soon as it is proved (assuming that it can be proved) it is not a faith (defined as a belief beyond evidence or logical arguments) any more and becomes merely a knowledge of a simple fact. Let me quote Gary Curtis. "To believe a dogma without evidence, or even despite counter-evidence, is sometimes regarded as more admirable than to believe on good evidence."

Therefore, if any religion was provable (and subsequently proved), there would be no need for faith any more. Even more importantly, proving the validity of any particular religion or faith system, would have to inevitably disprove most of other religions as a side effect, for most of them being mutually contradictory cannot be valid simultaneously.

Now, if we assume faith and reason to be orthogonal (which I believe is the only reasonable way to consider them) then using reason to analyze faith (which by definition would be inherently unanalyzable) might lead to committing subtle fallacies, like e.g. this quite popular one:

Every event must have a cause. Therefore, there must be a cause of every event, that is, a first cau

First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, as I enjoy most of your posts. For what it's worth, I think you are an excellent writer and thinker.

Thank you very much. I think you are too kind. I will quote you, though, if you don't mind.

While I don't have time to respond to your entire post, I did want to highlight one point where I disagreed with you.

I have never seen anyone saying that all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists. Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying that anywhere.

I have often experienced the sentiment that if you beleive in God you are not smart/logical/rational. I've heard it from strangers and close friends. There are even examples in the discussion you linked to in your last post. On Slashdot, I have been called weak-minded for beleiving in God.

That is very strange, almost unbelievable. Next time you might point such an ignorant person to Perl 6 website, and ask her to read Apocalypses by Larry Wall, especially Apocalypse 4 talking about the syntax per se, Apocalypse 3 explaining the operators in details, Apocalypse 5 about regular expressions, grammar rules and pattern matching in general, Apocalypse 6 on subroutines, closures, methods, submethods, multimethods, rules and macros, and the soon-to-be-published Apocalypse 12 about objects, classes, traits and roles (and I mean really read them, not merely skim or take a look at, it is actually quite an entertaining read anyway), which together form the most smart/logical/rational fundamentals of programming language design I have seen to date, and then ask her if she still thinks that when one believes in God one is not smart/logical/rational any more.

Indeed, Larry Wall being a hacker god (pun not intended this time) and also being alive at the same time, might actually be a better candidate for your Slashdot signature than Albert Einstein himself. Besides, Einstein never wanted to be a missionary, if I recall correctly, and thus his faith might be questioned.

Speaking about faith and reason, it seems rather strange that people consider them mutually exclusive. I myself always considered faith to be completely orthogonal to reason. Furthermore, I also fail to understand any desire to prove the existance of any object of faith (be it some deity or otherwise) because as soon as it is proved (assuming that it can be proved) it is not a faith (defined as a belief beyond evidence or logical arguments) any more and becomes merely a knowledge of a simple fact. Let me quote Gary Curtis. "To believe a dogma without evidence, or even despite counter-evidence, is sometimes regarded as more admirable than to believe on good evidence."

Therefore, if any religion was provable (and subsequently proved), there would be no need for faith any more. Even more importantly, proving the validity of any particular religion or faith system, would have to inevitably disprove most of other religions as a side effect, for most of them being mutually contradictory cannot be valid simultaneously.

Now, if we assume faith and reason to be orthogonal (which I believe is the only reasonable way to consider them) then using reason to analyze faith (which by definition would be inherently unanalyzable) might lead to committing subtle fallacies, like e.g. this quite popular one:

Every event must have a cause. Therefore, there must be a cause of every event, that is, a first cau

First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, as I enjoy most of your posts. For what it's worth, I think you are an excellent writer and thinker.

Thank you very much. I think you are too kind. I will quote you, though, if you don't mind.

While I don't have time to respond to your entire post, I did want to highlight one point where I disagreed with you.

I have never seen anyone saying that all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists. Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying that anywhere.

I have often experienced the sentiment that if you beleive in God you are not smart/logical/rational. I've heard it from strangers and close friends. There are even examples in the discussion you linked to in your last post. On Slashdot, I have been called weak-minded for beleiving in God.

That is very strange, almost unbelievable. Next time you might point such an ignorant person to Perl 6 website, and ask her to read Apocalypses by Larry Wall, especially Apocalypse 4 talking about the syntax per se, Apocalypse 3 explaining the operators in details, Apocalypse 5 about regular expressions, grammar rules and pattern matching in general, Apocalypse 6 on subroutines, closures, methods, submethods, multimethods, rules and macros, and the soon-to-be-published Apocalypse 12 about objects, classes, traits and roles (and I mean really read them, not merely skim or take a look at, it is actually quite an entertaining read anyway), which together form the most smart/logical/rational fundamentals of programming language design I have seen to date, and then ask her if she still thinks that when one believes in God one is not smart/logical/rational any more.

Indeed, Larry Wall being a hacker god (pun not intended this time) and also being alive at the same time, might actually be a better candidate for your Slashdot signature than Albert Einstein himself. Besides, Einstein never wanted to be a missionary, if I recall correctly, and thus his faith might be questioned.

Speaking about faith and reason, it seems rather strange that people consider them mutually exclusive. I myself always considered faith to be completely orthogonal to reason. Furthermore, I also fail to understand any desire to prove the existance of any object of faith (be it some deity or otherwise) because as soon as it is proved (assuming that it can be proved) it is not a faith (defined as a belief beyond evidence or logical arguments) any more and becomes merely a knowledge of a simple fact. Let me quote Gary Curtis. "To believe a dogma without evidence, or even despite counter-evidence, is sometimes regarded as more admirable than to believe on good evidence."

Therefore, if any religion was provable (and subsequently proved), there would be no need for faith any more. Even more importantly, proving the validity of any particular religion or faith system, would have to inevitably disprove most of other religions as a side effect, for most of them being mutually contradictory cannot be valid simultaneously.

Now, if we assume faith and reason to be orthogonal (which I believe is the only reasonable way to consider them) then using reason to analyze faith (which by definition would be inherently unanalyzable) might lead to committing subtle fallacies, like e.g. this quite popular one:

Every event must have a cause. Therefore, there must be a cause of every event, that is, a first cau

First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, as I enjoy most of your posts. For what it's worth, I think you are an excellent writer and thinker.

Thank you very much. I think you are too kind. I will quote you, though, if you don't mind.

While I don't have time to respond to your entire post, I did want to highlight one point where I disagreed with you.

I have never seen anyone saying that all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists. Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying that anywhere.

I have often experienced the sentiment that if you beleive in God you are not smart/logical/rational. I've heard it from strangers and close friends. There are even examples in the discussion you linked to in your last post. On Slashdot, I have been called weak-minded for beleiving in God.

That is very strange, almost unbelievable. Next time you might point such an ignorant person to Perl 6 website, and ask her to read Apocalypses by Larry Wall, especially Apocalypse 4 talking about the syntax per se, Apocalypse 3 explaining the operators in details, Apocalypse 5 about regular expressions, grammar rules and pattern matching in general, Apocalypse 6 on subroutines, closures, methods, submethods, multimethods, rules and macros, and the soon-to-be-published Apocalypse 12 about objects, classes, traits and roles (and I mean really read them, not merely skim or take a look at, it is actually quite an entertaining read anyway), which together form the most smart/logical/rational fundamentals of programming language design I have seen to date, and then ask her if she still thinks that when one believes in God one is not smart/logical/rational any more.

Indeed, Larry Wall being a hacker god (pun not intended this time) and also being alive at the same time, might actually be a better candidate for your Slashdot signature than Albert Einstein himself. Besides, Einstein never wanted to be a missionary, if I recall correctly, and thus his faith might be questioned.

Speaking about faith and reason, it seems rather strange that people consider them mutually exclusive. I myself always considered faith to be completely orthogonal to reason. Furthermore, I also fail to understand any desire to prove the existance of any object of faith (be it some deity or otherwise) because as soon as it is proved (assuming that it can be proved) it is not a faith (defined as a belief beyond evidence or logical arguments) any more and becomes merely a knowledge of a simple fact. Let me quote Gary Curtis. "To believe a dogma without evidence, or even despite counter-evidence, is sometimes regarded as more admirable than to believe on good evidence."

Therefore, if any religion was provable (and subsequently proved), there would be no need for faith any more. Even more importantly, proving the validity of any particular religion or faith system, would have to inevitably disprove most of other religions as a side effect, for most of them being mutually contradictory cannot be valid simultaneously.

Now, if we assume faith and reason to be orthogonal (which I believe is the only reasonable way to consider them) then using reason to analyze faith (which by definition would be inherently unanalyzable) might lead to committing subtle fallacies, like e.g. this quite popular one:

Every event must have a cause. Therefore, there must be a cause of every event, that is, a first cau

First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, as I enjoy most of your posts. For what it's worth, I think you are an excellent writer and thinker.

Thank you very much. I think you are too kind. I will quote you, though, if you don't mind.

While I don't have time to respond to your entire post, I did want to highlight one point where I disagreed with you.

I have never seen anyone saying that all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists. Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying that anywhere.

I have often experienced the sentiment that if you beleive in God you are not smart/logical/rational. I've heard it from strangers and close friends. There are even examples in the discussion you linked to in your last post. On Slashdot, I have been called weak-minded for beleiving in God.

That is very strange, almost unbelievable. Next time you might point such an ignorant person to Perl 6 website, and ask her to read Apocalypses by Larry Wall, especially Apocalypse 4 talking about the syntax per se, Apocalypse 3 explaining the operators in details, Apocalypse 5 about regular expressions, grammar rules and pattern matching in general, Apocalypse 6 on subroutines, closures, methods, submethods, multimethods, rules and macros, and the soon-to-be-published Apocalypse 12 about objects, classes, traits and roles (and I mean really read them, not merely skim or take a look at, it is actually quite an entertaining read anyway), which together form the most smart/logical/rational fundamentals of programming language design I have seen to date, and then ask her if she still thinks that when one believes in God one is not smart/logical/rational any more.

Indeed, Larry Wall being a hacker god (pun not intended this time) and also being alive at the same time, might actually be a better candidate for your Slashdot signature than Albert Einstein himself. Besides, Einstein never wanted to be a missionary, if I recall correctly, and thus his faith might be questioned.

Speaking about faith and reason, it seems rather strange that people consider them mutually exclusive. I myself always considered faith to be completely orthogonal to reason. Furthermore, I also fail to understand any desire to prove the existance of any object of faith (be it some deity or otherwise) because as soon as it is proved (assuming that it can be proved) it is not a faith (defined as a belief beyond evidence or logical arguments) any more and becomes merely a knowledge of a simple fact. Let me quote Gary Curtis. "To believe a dogma without evidence, or even despite counter-evidence, is sometimes regarded as more admirable than to believe on good evidence."

Therefore, if any religion was provable (and subsequently proved), there would be no need for faith any more. Even more importantly, proving the validity of any particular religion or faith system, would have to inevitably disprove most of other religions as a side effect, for most of them being mutually contradictory cannot be valid simultaneously.

Now, if we assume faith and reason to be orthogonal (which I believe is the only reasonable way to consider them) then using reason to analyze faith (which by definition would be inherently unanalyzable) might lead to committing subtle fallacies, like e.g. this quite popular one:

Every event must have a cause. Therefore, there must be a cause of every event, that is, a first cau

First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, as I enjoy most of your posts. For what it's worth, I think you are an excellent writer and thinker.

Thank you very much. I think you are too kind. I will quote you, though, if you don't mind.

While I don't have time to respond to your entire post, I did want to highlight one point where I disagreed with you.

I have never seen anyone saying that all of smart people or all of scientists are atheists. Not only on Slashdot, I have never seen anyone saying that anywhere.

I have often experienced the sentiment that if you beleive in God you are not smart/logical/rational. I've heard it from strangers and close friends. There are even examples in the discussion you linked to in your last post. On Slashdot, I have been called weak-minded for beleiving in God.

That is very strange, almost unbelievable. Next time you might point such an ignorant person to Perl 6 website, and ask her to read Apocalypses by Larry Wall, especially Apocalypse 4 talking about the syntax per se, Apocalypse 3 explaining the operators in details, Apocalypse 5 about regular expressions, grammar rules and pattern matching in general, Apocalypse 6 on subroutines, closures, methods, submethods, multimethods, rules and macros, and the soon-to-be-published Apocalypse 12 about objects, classes, traits and roles (and I mean really read them, not merely skim or take a look at, it is actually quite an entertaining read anyway), which together form the most smart/logical/rational fundamentals of programming language design I have seen to date, and then ask her if she still thinks that when one believes in God one is not smart/logical/rational any more.

Indeed, Larry Wall being a hacker god (pun not intended this time) and also being alive at the same time, might actually be a better candidate for your Slashdot signature than Albert Einstein himself. Besides, Einstein never wanted to be a missionary, if I recall correctly, and thus his faith might be questioned.

Speaking about faith and reason, it seems rather strange that people consider them mutually exclusive. I myself always considered faith to be completely orthogonal to reason. Furthermore, I also fail to understand any desire to prove the existance of any object of faith (be it some deity or otherwise) because as soon as it is proved (assuming that it can be proved) it is not a faith (defined as a belief beyond evidence or logical arguments) any more and becomes merely a knowledge of a simple fact. Let me quote Gary Curtis. "To believe a dogma without evidence, or even despite counter-evidence, is sometimes regarded as more admirable than to believe on good evidence."

Therefore, if any religion was provable (and subsequently proved), there would be no need for faith any more. Even more importantly, proving the validity of any particular religion or faith system, would have to inevitably disprove most of other religions as a side effect, for most of them being mutually contradictory cannot be valid simultaneously.

Now, if we assume faith and reason to be orthogonal (which I believe is the only reasonable way to consider them) then using reason to analyze faith (which by definition would be inherently unanalyzable) might lead to committing subtle fallacies, like e.g. this quite popular one:

Every event must have a cause. Therefore, there must be a cause of every event, that is, a first cau

No, Amazon uses Perl quite a bit. While that link doesn't give you much of an idea (although they've been on that site for a couple years now), I interviewed with them and Perl (and C and Linux) was most definitely an asset. (Unfortunately I turned them down for a dot-com and the rest is a lot of self-kicking.) I also had friends that were CS students at Seattle University who did projects in Perl for Amazon while in school (they were pissed about having to learn Perl).

Amazon uses Perl. A lot.

Ticketmaster uses Perl a lot too, so much so that they sponsor mod_perl development and have hired one of the main mod_perl developers full-time. And in that link you'll see that citysearch.com also uses mod_perl exclusively. Salon.com uses Bricolage as its CMS, which is mod_perl-based. The Register uses Bricolage too.

So it's possible to write large-scale and maintanable Perl projects.

how many times have you hacked something together in perl that ended up being relied on for some pretty important stuff, only to find 6 months down the track that there's some condition (db connects fine, but fails halfway through script execution as an example) you didn't consider and the whole thing just collapses in a heap - a nasty to recover heap cause you didn't write much logging code either.

The proper answer to this loaded and overly complex question is of course: "Countless." I did not need a "fault tolerant" shell, though, but real asynchronous I/O with good exception handling subsystem and events. That is why I look forward to Perl 6 and Parrot.

This would REALLY be useful when you're connecting to services external to yourself - network glitches cause more problems with my code than ANYTHING else, and it's a pain in the arse to write code to deal with it gracefully. i'd really really like to see a universal "try this for 5 minutes" wrapper, which, if it still failed, you'd only have one exit condition to worry about. hey, what the hell, maybe i'll spend a few days and write one myself.

Good luck then.

And how do you plan to manage those OpenBSD (or whatever) boxes evenly distributed around the globe?

Wow, there are certainly no tools at all that I could think of that would help me do that...

To quote one of my favorite legendary assholes: "This is unix. Stop acting so helpless."

(In all seriousness: yes, there are probably plenty of cases where there's no business case to be made for rolling your own system, and where Checkpoint's management console or a similar tool is probably a good choice.)

What if you add VPN to the soup?

Using Checkpoint? I'd say that you now have a pressing need for an aspirin. YMMV.

I'm not very familiar with Parrot

I'm not very familiar with Parrot

I'm not very familiar with Parrot

I'm not very familiar with Parrot

The other major time saver I use are sed and awk. I used each for a specific purpose. Sed works great for substitution, and awk I use to grab columns of data. Here's a sample of how I'd use both together. This will list the home directories of the users on a machine. It's simple, but there's a ton you can do with this technique.

who | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | sed 's@^@/home/@g'

Actually, you don't need awk, sed, sort or uniq to do that. You can use perl for everything:

who | perl '-laneprint$F[0]' | perl '-eprint sort<>' | perl '-ne$_{$_}++||print' | perl '-pe$_="/home/$_"'

Same thing, but without using awk, sed, sort or uniq at all.

Here's other stuff I have grouped by sections in my .cshrc

If you are programming in a csh-like shell and you are not reading comp.unix.shell you might want to take a look at this post by Tom Christiansen for a nice description of everything you should make sure to be especially careful with.

There's several probelms with that theory. First off, the Java VM is designed to run Java and not much else. This means that if you want to write JAVA, but in and assembly-like way you're all set. Parrot by contrast is designed to run any dynamically typed programming language, so you can write whatever you like for it.

Also, the JVM is not really a very good development environment. It is, for the most part, only used as a back-end. Parrot is designed from the beginning to be programmed in because there will be many times that it makes sense for a library to target Parrot with chunks in C for performance reasons.

To this end Parrot provides a paper-thin abstraction called IMCC which allows you to write code without having to worry about register spilling, etc.

Give Parrot a try, and when you have I guarantee playing with stone knives and bear-skins won't seem nearly so appealing anymore.

You can read about the new regex syntax in exegesis 5 (and its corresponding apocalypse)

Who remembers Perry Simm? Absolutely best story in a game manual ever.

And nowadays, some people are actually trying it. (I'm really curious if that project is real or if they are putting us on. Can anyone tell?)

Things are tight fisted because Sun wants a solid, CONSISTANT platform. This was a MAJOR REASON for the lawsuit that they fought and WON against Microsoft and their VM implementation

And, open-source software would be inconsistent because.......?

Inconsistent, like Apache?

or, perhaps, MySQL?

I get it. You mean inconsistent like this, this, or this?

Oh, the above aren't languages, like php or perl?

Eh, wait a minute. These are all *successful* projects, that are consistent?

If Sun were to open Java sources, it would be trivial to introduce a license (EG: GPL) that would largely offset forking of the codebase. Their best bet would be to pull a "QT" - open the source as GPL, then sell commercial licenses.

Ask the Headhunter sells a book and offers a free website and newsletter. All three are simply spectacular sources of advice, whether you are unemployed or not. I hype it every chance I get (and made a recent post about it here on slashdot; I wonder if the article submitter discovered ATH through my post).

Nick Corcodilos is not trying to hype his services as a headhunter. He no longer even works as a headhunter. A common misconception about headhunters is that job seekers should look for them or hire them. That is not true, and rarely happens. Headhunters are hired by employers looking to fill a position. You're not likely to be able to hire a headhunter to get you a job; instead you'll be contacted by a headhunter if he's aware of you through his contacts and thinks you're suitable for a position he is looking to fill.

Corcodilos is looking to sell his book, but he gives out tons of free advice through his website and weekly newsletter. He's even interacted with interested geeks on slashcode based forums like use Perl;. ATH floated around as a meme in the Perl community due mainly to Andy Lester starting around 2002. That was very convenient for me because I was "surplussed" in late 2002. I bought the ATH book immediately and have found its advice invaluable ever since (yes, I do have a job, and I still find the advice invaluable). Andy Lester used the ATH information to help in making hiring decisions.

The comparisons you suggest between job boards and headhunters don't make any sense, since headhunters don't offer a service to job seekers. If you read the site, you will see this for yourself.

"no one pretends for a moment that they're anything but hideously ugly," Does he mean the lines of code or the programmers themselves?

Hmmmm... I'm sure he couldn't have possibly meant the new sort syntax he just sent few hours ago to perl6-language mailing list:

[...] I give up... I can't manage to post an example, because of the stupid lameness filter...

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. [it should be turned off in Perl rlated articles] Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Lameness fi

"There's been an explosion at the ASCII factory!!!!"

ASCII Factory?! ASCII is so 20th century! Haven't you heard about the new Unicode operators like @aX+<<Y@b (where X and Y are French quotes (those little >> and <<) which Slashdot can't handle)? I kid you not.

Thank god threading is at the top of the list.

I've been a perl programmer for six years - I still use it daily - but perl5's support for threading absolutely blows. There are plenty of modules for whipping together a multithreaded TCP server, but no reliable way to share a resource such as a database connection pool between those child threads. Have had to put at least one project on indefinite hold due to this failure.

I assume its that oldskool anti-threading anti-OO attitude. Perl5 still isn't compiled with threading support by default and it breaks a tonne of modules and apps when it is.

Perl6 can't get here soon enough.

I really, really doubt I'll move over to 6 unless they have some really cool OO fixes

Well, they sure couldn't make OO in perl any WORSE, now could they?

(Speaking as a professional Perl programmer since '97...)

I like perl for a lot of reasons, but it's support for OO was clearly tacked on to the existing non-OO language. OO programming works well when you get the hang of it, but it's not intuitive, and the language actually makes it sort of awkward.

Browse the RFC list, though. Grep for "object". I started to post a list of OO RFCs that sounded really nice, but when I realized there were dozens, I stopped.

Suffice to say that OO in Perl 6 looks to be a lot better.

Perl, a high-level programming language that was critical in the initial construction of the Internet, ...

Perl was first released in 1987. Y'know, I could've sworn the internet already existed back then...

(especially since Perl was released in a post to alt.sources)

Disallowing patented code I see as reasonable, since I see that as one of the biggest potential future challenges the GPL will face - What happens when something like the Unisys mess happens, with code that has used the GPL for 10 years? Substantially violating the spirit of the GPL, I do not see as acceptible. Something like restricting it to non-commercial or non-military use gets a bit more messy, but the way I see it, letting someone use the GPL as the core of their license at least allows a stable underlying framework, and reduces the potential for having a hellish tangle of conflicting licenses (ie, would you rather read 27 pages of "Fred's semi-open license V3.1", or "GPL, with the exception that you can't use it for blah"?).

And what exactly is stopping you from doind this today? HINT: Mail::Sender module's man page:

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1997-2002 Jan Krynicky . All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.* There is only one aditional condition, [sic] you may NOT use this module for SPAMing! NEVER! (see http://spam.abuse.net/ for definition) [emphasis added].

*Perl itself may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the GNU General Public License, which means that the effective license of Mail::Sender is either the Artistic License with the added restriction or the GPL with said restriction. This is a restriction on use, mind you, which means that the Mail::Sender's license is an EULA, so it's even much more than what you are complaining about. Now, you might say that spamming is illegal anyway, or if you know Jenda that he himself doesn't give a flying fuck about spamming and this is why this very module was born in the first place, but still this is a clear example that what you imply is impossible, is in fact not only possible, but also being used for years.

Of course I might have failed to understand your real concerns, in which case please clarify what is your real problem with the GNU General Public License. (Of course I assume you have read it.)

Speaking about the advertising clause of original BSD-style licenses, I believe that changing the GPL to make them GPL-compatible would be unwise at least. That would cause the same problems as invariant sections in works covered by GNU FDL, while targetting a much less important issue. I highly urge you to consider this.

Work has already been done on this. Have you seen the Markov blogger on use Perl? Soon all bloggers will be replaced with a Perl script.

The new linux kernel is great, but the reason the this particlular kernel results is better performance ("5 times better") is because the application framework it is testing is horrible.

All of the "enterprise" applications in this test have several performance cripling features in common: socket per thread connections, fundemental reliance on threads, and massive memory foot print. Apache has one thread/process (the diff is a stack) per connections. Java requires a sizable multiple of memory usage as most other application languages (C/C++ obviously, but also Perl, Python, and PHP). J2EE is an inherently thread driven programming framwork.

So yes, Linux 2.6 ameliorates the downsides of unnecessary use of threading. It makes thread creation and context switching even faster on the Linux platform.

And Yes, Linux 2.6 memory management is fundementally better. Reverse Page Table Entry mappings make finding victim pages better; and it is designed to avoid victimizing active pages better.

But could you all imagine if people were designing fundementally better application framworks? Event driven application architectures like TwistedPython and POE, or Event-thread hybrid systems like SEDA.

The performance stats given in that article are shit, complete utter shit. I know. In the proprietary world I work in, I code faster programs on the same Linux platform on a daily basis; orders of magnitude faster.

All the accomplishments of Linux 2.6 can be used for true performance programming. I plead with you all, stop using Threads until you know what they are good for. Stop using the stack to maintain your program state. Throw off the shackles and learn to program network servers.

The Lizard.

MySQL.

GNU Project.

Slackware Linux.

Mepis Linux.

K Desktop Environment.

Gnome.

Perl.

Apache WebServer.

Roxen WebServer (very intuitive, and GPL!).

Phew!! And that's a short list!! There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of open source, free-for-all applications.... so many it's almost absurd not to use them!! Go ahead and get them!

One day someone will write a properly optimized vector language. PDL started going that way (with lazy evaluation and queued dataflow) but it hasn't materialized.

There's nothing wrong with ActiveState, except that they lag behind the main *nix releases

This is FUD. The standard release at times is far behind ActivePerl in providing bug fixes.

The patches that made ActivePerl 635 were basically released as Perl 5.6.2 (with some portability fixes) almost a year after ActivePerl 635 was released.

Here is a link to a p5p BOF about 5.6.2. I'll quote the interesting part:

A lot of bugs in 5.6.X are fixed in the ActiveState release and not in the general release. This needs to be fixed.

The perl5-porters list has already been hit by this virus resulting in 200+ messages being posted over a period of two to three hours yesterday. Additionally, it was reported on this list by Elizabeth Mattijsen on this list here that the Gnome XML list has similarly been affected.